The Giva Challenge: Giva Customers Are Talking! MetroHealth System

MetroHealth System, a hospital system providing quality care for over 175 years, has a history of constant growth and expansion. With humble beginnings in 1837 as the Cleveland, Ohio city infirmary, serving a population of 6,000 people, it experienced exponential growth with the arrival of the industrial revolution. Today, MetroHealth is one of the largest and most comprehensive public health systems in the country.

The Challenge

As any CIO will agree, keeping up with technology while staying within budget can be very challenging. Mike Norman, Sr. Manager, Data Center Operations for MetroHealth, was finding himself in a catch-22 situation. "We have to focus most of our budget on providing clinical applications, so finding budget leftover for help desk software is really difficult." And with increasing data theft and breaches of privacy and information in the healthcare industry, MetroHealth was finding itself in an increasingly vulnerable position.

Mr. Norman and his team had been using HEAT Software™ (formerly FrontRange Solutions). "Obviously the need to focus on clinical applications is required so we can deliver the best healthcare services possible. When we did perform upgrades for HEAT Software, we would usually break some functionality. When it broke, it usually stayed broke for a long time and so we would actually lose functionality following an upgrade. We felt like we were moving backwards with HEAT Software," commented Mr. Norman.

"We really needed to give this responsibility to someone else. Our conclusion was to give the responsibility to a HIPAA-compliant cloud service provider that specializes in ITIL help desk software. We wanted the vendor to develop, manage and upgrade the application, as well as let them worry about all the other aspects of the ITIL application. This is how we came to look at cloud vendors. We looked at pretty much all of the well-known ones such as BMC® Remedy Service Management™, ServiceNow® Service Management™, HP® Service Manager™, HP® Service Anywhere on SaaS™, CA® Cloud Service Management™, CA® Service Desk Manager™, BMC® FootPrints™, Salesforce.com® RemedyForce™, Manage Engine® Service Desk Plus™ and SysAid®."

The Solution

Due to their public entity status, MetroHealth was required to submit an RFP for this size of project. Said Mr. Norman, "When we carefully reviewed and evaluated the RFP responses, we concluded that Giva was the product that had the most flexibility and to us that was really the key. With Giva, we have reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) of our Service Management tools by approximately 60% when you consider a 5 year period."

MetroHealth has also experienced the following additional benefits of utilizing Giva:

• 50% reduction in time to deploy Giva's change, incident, problem, asset management and knowledge base modules
• Saved at least 1 FTE due to lower ongoing administration
• Saved 1 week per month due to easy-to-use reports
• 100% backward compatibility with all new Giva cloud releases which occur every 3 weeks
• 70% planned increase in productivity with mobile application

"Previously, in HEAT Software, our Service Desk Manager use to have to spend about a week every month just pulling reports. With Giva, in just a few hours a month, we can get better quality information/metrics and can use all that time to do more productive activities that will help reduce overall call volume," Mike Norman said.

For additional information, please see the full case study.

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